Audience eyes will bug out at the extraordinary, chilling work of production designer Joseph Bennett and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich ("Blade Runner," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind").

Aboard the space ship Event Horizon, lost to contact with Earth in 2040 on a research mission, strange liquids, tools and trash float in an eerie weightless environment.

The ship is a complicated, dark dungeon of steel-framed corridors and jagged chambers. A power room contains a glowing, slowly gyrating engine resembling the gears of a kitchen blender. Everything has a spiked or serrated look, and in half-light are chilling glimpses of human flesh rendered into a goo that has solidified.

STICKS IN THE MIND

It's not a great film, but "Event Horizon" produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.

Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson star. Each does a respectable if not entirely convincing job with a script that leaps from one horror to another with the histrionic feel of a slasher film.

The humans simply are no match for the imposing, claustrophobic look of "Event Horizon" and its awesome vision of a machine-turned-monster in deep space.

The spaceship Event Horizon was launched as a laboratory to explore the boundaries of the solar system. But once past Neptune the ship disappears and its crew is not heard from again except for a short bleep picked up by a tracking station on Earth after seven years of silence.

The film focuses on a search-and-rescue mission by a team aboard a smaller spacecraft, the Lewis & Clark. Fishburne is the tough-minded but too-dour captain. His navigator is played by Richardson, and the crew includes a medical expert (Quinlan) and piloting and technical types played by Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy and Sean Pertwee. It's odd that some of the crew members smoke cigarettes -- will future astronauts be allowed to light up?

BAD DREAMS

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Neill plays Dr. William Weir, who suffers from blood-curdling nightmares in which he sees his deceased wife (Holley Chant) as a pale-faced beauty with bleeding eyes. As the name implies, he's a weird scientist. He also designed the Event Horizon and knows everything about the ship -- except its fate.

Fishburne's controlled Captain Miller plays effectively against the increasingly strange Weir, who grows more infatuated with his own handiwork in designing the spaceship. The mysterious, demonic engine driving the ship is able to bend time. With a nervous smirk, Weir warns the crew members they've entered hell. And that's how audiences will agree.

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